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Our Evolution Towards Principles Thinking

Adults face challenging journies throughout their personal, social and professional lives, with the modern World throwing up more possibilites but also more complexity.

In looking at how adults can best rise to these challenges whilst maintaining balance and health, there is an important distinction to be made between behavioural health (referred to here as "horizontal health" influenced significantly around a person's personality) and vertical development.

The field of "horizontal health" in personal and management development is very mature, with a wealth of tools and services on the market (from MBTI personality tests to Hogan personal inventories to the Enneagram archetypes etc.).

These tools provide extremely useful guidance for each individual to be aware of their traits and shadows, and there can be direct improvements as to how each person can optimally align themselves in terms of their roles, responsibilites and relationships at work.

To drill down to one element such as intelligence belies the fact that individuals confront a wide range of personal, inter-personal. moral reasoning and meaning-making challenges in their working lives. There are very successful entrepreneurs for example who have do not necessarily demonstrate correspondingly exceptional levels of "g" intelligence.

Because of such observations, contemporary appreciation of "whole person" approaches supported by the horizontal health tools over the past 50 years have been so successful. Research into multiple and emotional intelligences has gained a huge following without being backed by robust statistical metrics (not to say that these are not valid fields) .

But in throwing out the notion of any vertical performance comparisons, the horizontal health proponents have thrown out a crucial aspect of how adults do indeed progress along a vertical scale of cognitive maturity, and that their progress can be nurtured and supported.

This adult jouirney of vertical progression has been researched over the past 100 years, with pionners such as Baldwin, Graves, Piaget, Cook-Greuter, Torbert and Kegan.

There are later stages of development with very distinct attributes, for example where managers display self-contradictory styles. It has been shown that managers with such seemingly ambiguous traits in fact have been consistently scored by peers, subordinates and superiors as the most effective managers, as they shape-shift in a timely manner to each organisational challenge and context (ref. Competing Values Framework, Cameron and Quinn, 1999, p. 42)

Skill Shift Coaching is a virtuous learning process based on the field of adult developmental psychology, that supports executives in their self-authoring progression along a journey of increasing scope in their:

navigating complexity

perspective taking, choosing and seeking

crtical and moral reasoning, and

self-awareness

Learning and development

The non profit learning and development tools organisation Lectica based near Boston, is one of the most interesting that I have come across over the years in this space - with a very distinct positioning in comparison to the personality type testing providers.

Below are a few references to their approach.

The following capacties are both measured (summative testing*) and developed (formative / embedded testing) through the Lectica testing products: